Location:
Blue Lake, Utah
Max Depth: 55 feet
Date: November 10, 2002
Party Members: Travis Adsitt, Michelle & Mikayla Lyman
Dives:
Links: Blue Lake
Description (by Michelle Lyman):
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Okay, so Wendover is
a teensy bit further from Boise than 3 hours...let's try 6 hours!!! Three
hundred and six miles according to mapquest... Upon discovering this
previously overlooked fact, we scrambled like mad folk to get organized,
packed and under way Saturday night instead of Sunday morning. We were on
the road [again] by 7:30 p.m. and had an uneventful trip to Jackpot, where
we crashed for the night. We woke to snow on the ground, had a hasty
breakfast and headed out of Dodge; destination...20 miles south of the
middle of nowhere! (aka Blue Lake) This was the maiden voyage with the micro humans so we took our time once we arrived at the dive site. Our intention was to have a flawless experience to plant the seeds of scuba passion...and it nearly happened that way! It was a little chilly, and the experience of having the cool (72 degree) water slowly seeping into their suits was a new one for the kids. A few squeals, giggles and gasps later, they were fully flooded and ready to be weight tested. Once that was done and everyone was set according to PADI standards, we decided that the youngen's needed hoods. This required unzipping their now warmed wetsuits while they were still in the water...a few more squeals, giggles and gasps later (and some missing skin from Travis' back), they were weighted, hooded and ready to dive! (I don't think I mentioned that we somehow left the dive shop with a leaky kid regulator, a 3/4 full kid tank and only 1/2 of Michelle's wetsuit! All of which were overcome with a little ingenuity and only minor cussing) We snorkeled out to our chosen decent area talked about a plan and down we went...sort of. Matt, Travis and Mikayla were all too floaty so we headed back to shore and added more weight...so much for the PADI weight test! Now sufficiently heavy, we snorkeled out again and down we went...sort of. Mikayla had some trouble with her ears so after a few failed attempts, we looked around for the boy's bubbles and hoped they'd notice that they were minus the girls. After several minutes of waiting, an ENORMOUS balloon burst to the surface, followed closely by Travis popping out so high I think his belly button surfaced! Matt was shortly behind and we all had a good giggle over the expansion of the balloon. The 4 of us snorkeled back in, did some practice skills in shallow water, got Mikayla's ears cleared and headed back down. Once submerged, we were immediately surrounded by schools of very hungry, inquisitive bluegills. We passed a very nice dive platform set up for scuba classes, played with our buoyancy, then Matt did a slow motion giant stride off the underwater platform and down we went. At the bottom, we discovered a small boat, complete with a laptop computer and a "for indoor use only" power source. :) Just off to the side of the boat, the bottom looked as if it were boiling! We played there for a LONG time, I think that was the favorite part for Travis and Mikayla, they stuck their arms into the bubbling, warm silt all the way up past their elbows. We passed around a little blue matchbox race car that Michelle found, and at some point, Travis found some toilet paper down in the silt. That, we did NOT pass around! Leaving the race car for the next explorers, we headed off to explore more of the lake bottom. Not far from the boat we had a close encounter with a hammer head shark! We swam around the shark (sculpture) for a while, then headed off in search of the other critter sculptures. Those will have to wait for next time, however. We circled back to the boat, played there a little more, took some swan dives off the gunwale, did an air check and headed up. We did our safety stop at 15-20 feet for 3 minutes, surfaced and snorkeled back to the shore (after first locating the camera that Michelle had dropped when her tank fell off! Good thing it floated!) By this time the kiddos were chilled so we sent them back to the tent for dry clothes. They sat in the truck, enjoying the heater, wrapped in a wool blanket, while Matt hauled and Michelle disassembled the equipment. All in all, the maiden dive was a rip roaring success! The drive back was uneventful, although very snowy, and we'll go back to Blue Lake. |
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Max Depth: 39 feet
Date: December 29, 2003
Party Members: Travis Adsitt, Michelle & Mikayla Lyman
Dives:
Links: Blue Lake
Description (Matt):
We didn't actually get a lot of diving in as the kids were a little freaked out. We got to Blue lake a little late and skipped over our afternoon dive and went right into our night dive. Travis was okay with it but Michelle's daughter didn't want anything to do with it. We all sat on a platform at fifteen feet for a few minutes feeding Cheez Wiz to the Sun fish that we woke up... then the girls went to the surface while Travis and I took a few more minutes to explore a new area that we didn't see the last time we were there. We found a new sunken boat (well, it was new to us anyway), that was standing on it's stern with the bow sticking straight up. We also found a tower of PVC monkey bars. We didn't stay long though before heading to the surface, and swam back to the Colman lantern that we'd left lighting up the dock
Now here's an example of what a bone head I can be. Who goes on a scuba diving trip and forget their wet suit hanging in the garage? Me that's who. It's a good thing the waters of Blue lake are so warm (70 degrees) or we wouldn't have even got that much diving in. But as it was, the air temp was much colder so once out of the water, I knew I needed to get into my dry cloths as fast as possible. So I stripped down to my birthday suit at the lake's edge and made a quick exit and darted to the pile of cloths that I'd left out. Travis thought watching me climb out of the lake buck naked was the funniest thing he'd ever seen for as hard as he laughed. And next time, remind me to leave my cloths right side out BEFORE I go diving. Anyway, once I was dry and warm, I helped the rest out of the water and it was my turn to poke fun while they made the three hundred yard march to the truck in their wet suits. Even though we didn't dive much, I was feeling good and couldn't help but smile while I made repetitive hauling trips between the dock and the truck.
Description (Michelle):
I learned two things our second Blue Lake dive. The first, it’s amazing how clearly you can hear words of distress when uttered underwater through the mouthpiece of a regulator, and the second, you can dive under a full moon when there is no moon in the sky.
We all got settled and in the water, waiting for Matt. He had to get in last because he left his wetsuit in Boise. We had set my lantern on the dock since it was dark before we ever got ourselves situated and ready to go. We had our homing beacon in place and snorkeled out to where we could find the dive platform. This was the first night dive for the kiddos, so we sat on the underwater platform for a while, feeding the bluegill while the kids became accustom to the strange new type of diving. Mikayla signaled to me that she was getting cold, so we headed for the bottom to swim around a bit and find the warmer water where the spring enters the lake. We settled on the bottom near a construction sign and she looked at me, eyes big as quarters, and said, as clearly as if she were on the couch next to me, “I don’t like this!” Hearing that, and seeing her sweet little brown eyes all wide and frightened, I signaled to her that we were heading up. I didn’t know where the boys were, but I knew they’d not be far behind, so we surfaced and snorkeled back toward out lantern. Once on the surface, Mika seemed much more relaxed (I, on the other hand, hate not being able to see what’s below me, I’d rather be under water in the dark than on top of it!) We floated near the dock for a while and about 2 minutes later, the boys surfaced out in the darkness of the lake. I signaled to them with my light and they swam in.
Up until this point, the night was very dark, no heavenly bodies but the stars. The moon, however, was about to rise! We all floated in the water as Matt stripped out of all of his gear in the water…all of it, shorts, too! I was sheltering sweet Mikayla from the brightness of this full moon and all I heard was the howl of Travis’ hysterical laughter as his dad was fumbling around in the bags, nekkid as the day he was born. Ah, the interesting astronomical events that can happen in the Salt Flats…I never knew I’d *bare* witness to a full moon in the *bottom* of an ancient lake bed on a night when there was supposed to be no moon.
After class, Trav and I grabbed the fullest tanks we had and headed back to the lake for an evening dive that turned into a night dive by the time we got all setup. We went down to the platform and fed the fish some Cheeze-wiz but they weren't all that interested. I think they were too sleepy. We headed east and found the vertical boat, circled it and headed over to the second platform. By this time we were reaching the red zone on our air and surfaced. Tim (my instructor) was hanging around on the shore to make sure we found our way back in the dark. He left a little flashlight on the bank for us to follow in and said goodnight. We swam back, packed up and headed home.